XOOPS Community voted and the winners of 2008/2009  ”Marcello Brandao XOOPS Innovation Award”  have been announced:

1. The XOOPS 2.5.0 Development Team: 32% of votes: Nicolas Andricq (ForMusS), Cointin Maxime (kraven30), and Grégory Mage (Mage)
2. Herve Thouzard (Hervet): Oledrion: 13% of votes
3. Ricardo Costa (Trabis): MyTabs, MyComments: 9% of votes
4. Laurent JEN (DuGris): XOOPS Installer: 9% of votes

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I received a review copy of Joel Sartore’s new book, RARE: Portraits of America’s Endangered Species, and greatly appreciated it. It is published by National Geographic. The book presents 68 iconic images representing Joel’s three-year investigation into the Endangered Species…

Nashua, New Hampshire, USA, March 16, 2010 – Kentico Software (http://www.kentico.com), the Web content management system vendor, announces the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award, which is a one year industry recognition given to individuals based on their community participation and evangelistic activities in the CMS and .NET communities. 

“Kentico MVP’s are passionate about the tools and technologies of Kentico, .Net and the CMS community worldwide,“ says Thom Robbins, Product Evangelist at Kentico.

The very first person to be honored with the Kentico Most Valuable (MVP) Award is Richard Pendergast for his exceptional contributions to the Kentico community, represented especially by the Kentico Developer magazine he founded and manages.

“I feel very honored,“ says Richard Pendergast, Kentico Developer Magazine Director and founder. “This award means a great deal to me. Respecting and admiring so many of the Kentico partners I work with, means that to be singled out from amongst such a talented group feels like a really big deal. I look forward to taking advantage of this opportunity and working even more closely with the wider Kentico community.”

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Optical Image Technology (OIT) and client Panhandle Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of West Virginia has been named one of three national finalists for the 2010 AIIM Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award in the small company category.  The award recognizes excellence in the field of enterprise content management (ECM) technology, showcasing projects that have achieved a strong return on investment.  The “best practices” designation denotes processes that are quantifiable, adaptable, and repeatable. 

One of the first insurers in the region to transition from paper to electronic files and processing, Panhandle implemented OIT’s DocFinity^® document and content management software for front-end scanning and secure electronic file access.  Ultimately, Panhandle’s DocFinity integration with their web-based policy administration system, company portal, website, and more eliminated paper-based processing and enabled secure remote access for agents and customers. 

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This year, I had the privilege of participating as a member on the judging panel for Packt Publishing’s Overall Best Open Source CMS Award. As I mentioned last month, WordPress was declared the winner of the award followed by MODx, SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, and finally XOOPS. Since the award announcement, I’ve had a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. I decided to wait for a month before my posting my rankings of the Web applications because I wanted focus to remain on the declared winners and not my individual choices.

My rankings for the Overall Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. WordPress
2. DotNetNuke
3. SilverStripe
4. MODx
5. XOOPS

Each of the judges on the panel, selects their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. Despite the criteria given, the fact is the best CMS is the CMS you determine is best in meeting your project requirements. In other words, you may find that all five CMSes in this category meet your project needs or in some cases none of the given applications will meet your requirements. Despite how I ranked the CMS you still need to do your own homework before choosing what your “best” CMS.

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After four years, WordPress has finally earned respect from the judges in Packt Publishing’s 2009 Open Source CMS Award. WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award and is finally being recognized for its evolution from a blogging application to a full fledged Web content management system. Packt also declared MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position in this award.

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

While WordPress occupied the top spot in the Overall Award, the other two extremely popular finalists MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position. After Pixie and Pligg sharing a similar result for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot.

It is important to note that neither Drupal nor Joomla! competed in the Overall Best category as previous winners in this category compete in the Hall of Fame category. This year, Drupal out competed Joomla! in both the Hall of Fame category as well as the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. Joomla! may be out of luck this year but you surely can’t count them out as the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 version should keep them competitive for next year. With three CMS now included in the Hall of Fame it should be an interesting rivalry between the three in 2010.

Some personal notes about the 2009 winners: As one of the judges for the Overall Best Open Source CMS, I too thought WordPress earned the spot for first place. However, I thought DotNetDuke should have been a runner up as I was impressed with it from a usability perspective. Similar to last year, I plan to eventually write a post of my review and the order in which I judged the CMS to be the best among the five finalists for this category. For now though, I don’t want to take the spotlight away from either MODx or SilverStripe as the well deserved runner up winners.

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Packt Publishing announced that ImpressCMS has won the Most Promising Open Source CMS category in their 2009 Open Source CMS Award.

While ImpressCMS took first place in this category, Pixie and Pligg weren’t far behind and settled for a tie in the first runner up spot.

ImpressCMS has featured in the top three in this category for the second time in a row, and has lived up to its reputation this year by winning the top spot.

Pixie and Pligg, on the other hand, featured in this category for the first time and managed to impress a lot of judges with their quality and support.

The “Most Promising” category is my favorite of all the categories in Packt’s open source CMS award system. The CMSs in this category are lesser known applications requiring the judges on the panel to do a lot more homework than usual and sometimes coming up with some surprises in their analysis. This category is Packt’s biggest contribution for getting lesser known open source CMSs the exposure they most likely deserve.

Last year, I had the honor of judging the Most Promising category and was pleased to see SilverStripe get the nod from this award. In 2008, ImpressCMS was also evaluated for this category and left me with a positive impression.

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Drupal was announced the winner in Packt Publishing’s 2009 award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS. Instant replay at the finish line may have been required as Packt reports that Wordpress and Joomla! were not too far behind the leading CMS.

We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

Drupal receives $2,000 in award money with both Wordpress and Joomla! as joint runner ups collecting $500 each. As Packt notes, this is the first time Wordpress has worked its way into the top three in the Best PHP CMS category.

While Drupal and Joomla! have always consistently featured among the top three in this category, WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.

This award is another validation for Wordpress that it is finally losing its reputation as a blog-only application. The yearly tug-of-war between Drupal and Joomla! has now become a three-way tie with Wordpress now in the mix.

Packt Publishing announced today the winner of their 2009 Best Open Source Other CMS Award. Using the word “Other” is Packt’s way of saying non-PHP content management system. For the second straight year the winner for Best Open Source Other CMS is Plone.

Since the introduction of this category in 2007, Plone has consistently featured among the top three, having won it in 2008. In another close contest, dotCMS had to settle for the first runner up position, finishing ahead of mojoPortal in the second runner spot.

So far, Packt has not given many details as to why the judges selected Plone over the remaining non-PHP finalists. I do know that last year, the judges praised “the ecosystem that is developing around Python and Zope is encouraging” for which supports Python. We’ll add to this article if additional details are made public by Packt or the judges themselves. 

Perhaps there is very little surprise to also see dotCMS and mojoPortal listed within the the top three CMS in this category. However, I’m surprised that we don’t see a mention of DotNetNuke as a winner in this category. In a recent review of DotNetNuke, I found the CMS to be much improved from previous years and doing a lot of the right things in the area of usability.

Update: Judge Stoyan Stefanov has posted his notes from his review of the five finalists in this categegory: http://www.phpied.com/open-source-cms-aw…

By now, many of us are excited to see the finalists for this year’s Packt Publishing Open Source CMS (Content Management System) Award competition, the annual contest in which dozens of companies compete to be highlighted as the year’s finest Content Management System.

Entering its fourth year, this competition has grown nearly five-fold and is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in the CMS industry. But as successful as the competition has become, it sadly suffers from inherent issues which prevent it from truly presenting today’s gamut of CMS choices in a valuable way.

Here is the reason: to even be considered as a finalist in the competition, each CMS is judged on exactly one condition: community vote counts. Granted, this can be a valid measure of a CMS’s success, however today’s CMS environment is very polarized. We see large majorities of people using Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress, often simply because those are the CMSs in the headlines.

As a result, these CMSs are naturally going to have far more votes in every competition – they are votes from people who already use these CMSs and who rarely branch out to explore alternatives. This self-fulfilling cycle ensures that these few CMSs continue to dominate our headlines, simply because they were the early winners and can rely on their present install-base for votes, rather than relying on the merits, features, and usability of their own systems in comparison with other CMSs.

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